An affordable Intel Z68 chipset motherboard has landed

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Our Verdict

A budget Z68 that may be basic but is a better performer than its predecessors

For

Excellent value

QuickSync and SRT

Good performance

Against

No SLI

No Crossfire

At the price that ASRock can apparently produce motherboards like the ASRock Z68 Pro 3, based on Intel's latest Z68 chipset, you might find yourself asking the utterly reasonable question: "what's the point of anything else?"

There are H61s, H67s and P67s galore out there, and all of them will work in tandem with a second generation Intel Core processor. But since the ASRock Z68 Pro 3 is based on the best of the best and available for only just over £100, what really is the point of browsing beyond it?

To recap, the Z68 has all the overclocking features of previous high-end boards, but can do two things no other chipset can. It has Intel's Smart Response Technology (SRT), which enables you to use a small, high-speed SSD as a cache drive, and Lucid's Virtu software on board too.

That software layer, uniquely, enables you to use a discrete graphics card in the PCI-Express slot and still take advantage of Intel's awesome GPU video encoding booster, QuickSync.